Monthly Archives: January 2011

We have followed the story of Professor Penelope Blake and the program on the Pacific theater in World War II in a series of posts beginning with “Investigate this” (the letter to Rep. Manzullo that is referred to below is in that post). The program in issue was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, of which Jim Leach is the chairman. Yesterday Professor Blake wrote Leach as follows: »

You can see it coming: 1) President Obama has been rebounding in the polls. 2) The Democrats claim credit for a productive lame duck Congressional session, even though the highlight of the session was the Democrats’ failure to pass their own $1.1 trillion spending bill, and its only real achievement was extending the Bush tax cuts. And 3) at tomorrow night’s State of the Union speech, Obama will wrap himself »

Liberals in Connecticut are “trying to draft Keith Olbermann for Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat.” Why not? Olbermann “used to live in Connecticut,” and he could move back there, just like Al Franken. Olbermann could be the perfect Democratic candidate–just as far left as Ned Lamont, and crazy, too. »

Scott wrote here about President Obama’s state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao, and pianist Lang Lang, who played an anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie “Battle on Shangganling Mountain.” The tune is, apparently, universally known in China and many have argued that Lang, and perhaps others, intended a political message. The article to which Scott linked includes this description of a blog »

At least 31 people have been killed, and many more wounded, in an apparent terrorist attack at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport. While I haven’t seen any hard information, the attack is presumed to be the work of Islamic extremists, likely Chechens. This cell phone video was shot just moments after the bomb went off and gives some idea of the number of victims. The bomb, perhaps detonated by a suicide bomber, »

The Obama administration’s National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Jim Leach is a piece of work. He announced in November 2009 that he was undertaking a 50-state “civility tour” in his capacity as chairman. Who does this guy think he is? Not even Bruce Springsteen does 50-state tours, but then again Springsteen has to pay his own way. Leach draws on the NEH’s approximately $160 million budget to perform his »

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave Jennifer Rubin an interview that is not to be missed on “The decline of the Justice Department.” The interview appeared in the new issue of the Weekly Standard that was published on Saturday. Judge Mukasey gave up a lucrative legal practice to step into the breach at the Department of Justice during the last year of the Bush administration. He is a gentleman and »

A liberal radio personality in Madison, Wisconsin ridicules that state’s lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, with crude sex jokes, and also mocks the fact that she has suffered from cancer: Yawn. This is the kind of thing conservatives hear from liberals all the time. »

It is hard not to compare the press coverage of Jared Loughner’s Tucson rampage with that of Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood. Hasan killed and wounded twice as many as Loughner, and the fact that he was an officer in the United States Army would seem to give his attack a particular significance as well as a unique horror. Moreover, Loughner was just a nut, while Hasan was part »

Before he went on vacation at the end of December, Ronald Radosh turned his attention to Frances Fox Piven’s desire for European-style riots in the United States. Radosh’s post on Piven is “The second time is farce: Frances Fox Piven calls for a new Cloward-Piven strategy for today.” It provides useful background to John’s post on “The left’s Tucson strategy: Stage two.” »

Word is that President Obama will focus on jobs in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. No surprise there: jobs are the American people’s top public policy concern. Obama reportedly will propose new and expanded federal spending programs as the means of job creation. No surprise there either: what else do liberals have to offer? Yet if there is one thing we know with an empirical certainty, it »

Breitbart has picked up the intriguing report “Chinese pianist plays propaganda tune at White House” by Matthew Robinson from PR Newswire. It opens as follows: Lang Lang the pianist says he chose it. Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an »

Tracy Nelson has been a favorite of mine for a long time. I heard her first as the vocalist for the San Francisco and Memphis based group Mother Earth in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Thanks to compact discs, the Mother Earth catalogue has been restored to print in its entirety. I highly recommend it. “Bring Me Home” and “Best of Tracy Nelson/Mother Earth” provide a good overview of »

The Left’s attempt to link the Tucson shootings to angry rhetoric (not theirs, of course) was stage one of a broader strategy–what both military men and political strategists refer to as preparing the battlefield. The movement to feign nonpartisanship at the State of the Union address by seating Republicans and Democrats together is another aspect of this stage. At the same time, the Left is moving on to stage two–an »

Jennifer Rubin got Judge Michael Mukasey to talk about what has happened to the Department of Justice since he turned it over to Eric Holder. The result is explosive. Mukasey is a sober and distinguished judge and lawyer with first-hand knowledge of many of the relevant facts, so his characterizations should be given considerable weight. In a nutshell, he says that Eric Holder (presumably with the blessing of Barack Obama) »

The Daily Ditch is my preferred name for Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic blog. You can visit our collected annals of the Daily Ditch via our Google search engine. Sullivan’s almost unbelievable ignorance of history was my central theme in “Obama veers into the Daily Ditch.” Like Falstaff in reverse, he is not only witless, he is the cause of witlessness in others — others including President Obama. It is, In its »

The alliance between big government and big business should raise the hackles on the necks of ordinary citizens. In the cases of GM and Chrysler, we have seen a variety of wrongs committed with government power and taxpayer money. Harnessed to the power of government, big business can really get cracking. It can sell products to big government. It can bulk up on direct and indirect subsidies derived from the »